Government and public sector organisations continue to seek ways to improve services and mitigate the risk of migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud. Already, many organisations, focused on improving the citizen experience, have set their sights on the cloud. Flexible, agile and affordable, managed cloud can accelerate the agency mission. Still, CIOs are cautious about which applications to prioritise and what steps they must take to ensure the reality fulfils the promise.

What you look for in a cloud provider depends to a large extent on the drivers and challenges that you are experiencing.

People with large legacy estates, for instance, tend to be looking for a hybrid cloud solution that can support both their old legacy workloads and their new cloud ones. Some see this as a transitional arrangement to cover the period in which workloads are migrated to the cloud, but many realise that there are certain workloads for which migration will never be either technologically...

UKCloud has announced a collaboration with Microsoft and Cisco to provide what is claimed to be the UK’s only implementation of Microsoft Azure Stack dedicated to the public sector.

The company says it is moving its focus from ‘public cloud for public sector’ to becoming ‘multi-cloud experts’, as organisations progress from initial cloud deployments. Through Cisco as an OEM partner, companies can use Azure alongside other platforms, such as Oracle, VMware, and OpenStack.

GPUs are becoming ever more attractive to cloud service providers and customers as the demand for intensive computing increases – and UKCloud has become the first European cloud service provider to offer a cloud GPU computing service through NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 and M60 units.

UKCloud, formerly Skyscape, offers services for the public sector as well as healthcare. The company said the move for GPUs came about through its ‘maniacal focus’ on service excellence following customer demand...

I recently read with interest the results of the latest Cloud Industry Forum research survey into UK Cloud adoption and a couple of aspects jumped out at me, undoubtedly mirroring the experience iland is having within the UK market.

Overall cloud adoption rates among British businesses now stand at 88% and the rate of cloud adoption has increased by a whopping 83% since 2010, with an increase of 5% since last year. In fact, today, we rarely speak with a customer that isn't...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it has signed a criminal justice information services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Oregon, enabling AWS GovCloud services available to the state’s law enforcement officers.

Oregon joins California, Colorado, and Minnesota among others in signing up to AWS’s cloud services. The provider has two availability zones in its US GovCloud data centre.

“We are committed to doing our part as a cloud service provider by giving...

Even though almost three quarters of the major UK councils say they use cloud technologies for data storage in some capacity, almost half say they are yet to formulate plans to use cloud computing.

That’s the main finding from not for profit IT service provider Eduserv, in responses provided by the top 100 councils in the UK. 44% of those polled said they did not have a strategy or IT policy in place – and of that number, only 15% say they are exploring or considering a...

Talking to IT teams and business leaders, it is clear that the benefits of cloud in supporting new business models for the delivery across the public sector is now well understood.

There is also a growing consensus that the different business model for IT operations which is enabled by cloud IT, could add substantial value to the organisations – particularly local authorities - as they shape and reshape services in the future.

Shared services across the public sector continue to grow. Councils in particular are choosing to partner with neighbours, to share capacity, costs, risk and best practice.

The experience of many public sector shared services projects, show the importance of IT in successful shared programmes. Meanwhile in the private sector, recent research by McKinsey into the role of IT in mergers and acquisitions shows that typically 50% of merger value is related to IT synergy.

In 2016, the One Public Estate programme will see 100 councils receive £31 million of funding in order to help them make better use of public sector property.

The idea is that local public sector bodies – from neighbouring councils to emergency services – start disposing of, or sharing, buildings in order to reduce running costs, free up property/land for redevelopment and raise money.

In a sector where money is scarce, one of the most compelling areas for...

If we have learned anything about budget announcements over the past 10 years, it is to prepare yourself for the unexpected. I’d be surprised, however, if anyone predicted the extent to which the 2015 Autumn Statement put such an emphasis on the role of IT in the transformation of government.

Lean government

With substantial job cuts resulting from reduced funding right across the public sector, the Chancellor’s clear objective is that by 2020, processes which still...

If there is one shortage we will never suffer in the technology sector, it is one of attention-grabbing sound-bites.

The latest one to do the rounds is the ‘cloud hangover’. It has been coined to describe the undesirable after-effects of a move to the cloud, the most painful of which is the significant unplanned for expenditure incurred by organisations in maintenance...

Even though the public sector is adopting cloud as a key part of its IT strategy, new research from Sungard Availability Services has revealed the sector is facing a large number of challenges in managing and operating cloud environments.

According to the report, entitled ‘Digital by Design: Avoiding the cloud hangover in the UK public sector’, UK public sector organisations are spending over £300 million each year on ‘hidden costs’ associated with their...

The Canadian Cancer Society (CCSSK), based in Saskatchewan, has launched an omni-channel engagement centre utilising cloud telephony from NewVoiceMedia and Salesforce, and found charitable donations had increased by 40%.

At the society’s Relay for Life event, participation went up 30% and pledge numbers increased by 70%. The company looked to the cloud primarily to provide a greater customer experience. Utilising Salesforce data, employees were able to create more...

Small criminals are predictable, at least that's what London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) are hoping. New software, developed by Accenture, pulls large amounts of data in-use by the police service and puts it through an advanced analytics engine to predict when criminals are likely to strike.

By analysing five years' worth of data, it is hoped that an accurate prediction of when / if a criminal will re-offend can be made. The data was gathered over a four year period of...

Categories

Cloud Tech promotes industry thought leadership content from industry brands, businesses and analysts, partnering with writers and bloggers to deliver insight and advice on cloud IT strategy to our extensive audience of CIOs and IT managers.